With race-horses selection for swiftness has been followed methodically, and our horses can now easily beat their progenitors. The increased size and different appearance of the English race-horse led a good observer in India to ask, "Could any one in this year of 1856, looking at our race-horses, conceive that they were the result of the union of the Arab horse and the African mare?"[513] This change has, it is probable, been largely effected through unconscious selection, that is, by the general wish to breed as fine horses as possible in each generation, combined with training and high feeding, but without any intention to give to them their present appearance. According to Youatt,[514] the introduction in Oliver Cromwell's time of three celebrated Eastern stallions speedily affected the English breed; "so that Lord Harleigh, one of the old school, complained that the great horse was fast disappearing." This is an excellent proof how carefully selection must have been attended to; for without such care, all traces of so small an infusion of Eastern blood would soon have been absorbed and {213} lost. Notwithstanding that the climate of England has never been esteemed particularly favourable to the horse, yet long-continued selection, both methodical and unconscious, together with that practised by the Arabs during a still longer and earlier period, has ended in giving us the best breed of horses in the world. Macaulay[515] remarks, "Two men whose authority on such subjects was held in great esteem, the Duke of Newcastle and Sir John Fenwick, pronounced that the meanest hack ever imported from Tangier would produce a finer progeny than could be expected from the best sire of our native breed. They would not readily have believed that a time would come when the princes and nobles of neighbouring lands would be as eager to obtain horses from England as ever the English had been to obtain horses from Barbary." The London dray-horse, which differs so much in appearance from any natural species, and which from its size has so astonished many Eastern princes, was probably formed by the heaviest and most powerful animals having been selected during many generations in Flanders and England, but without the least intention or expectation of creating a horse such as we now see. If we go back to an early period of history, we behold in the antique Greek statues, as Schaaffhausen has remarked,[516] a horse equally unlike a race or dray horse, and differing from any existing breed.